President Donald Trump failed this week to defang North Korea, and his critics on all sides pounced.

From the right, NeverTrump conservative and Council on Foreign Relations fellow Max Boot tweeted: “It turns out that Trump’s entire outreach to North Korea has been built on a mountain of misconceptions. The intelligence community was right and Trump was wrong: North Korea has no intention of denuclearizing.”

Rep. Mike Levi (D-Calif.) expressed his disgust that Trump said the United States and North Korea had a “special relationship.”

Even “The Daily Show” got into the act, chortling on Twitter that, “Trump's North Korea denuclearization talks were Kim Jong-unsuccessful.”

And others argued that Trump elevated Kim by meeting with him and gave the North Koreans a public relations victory.

There is some dispute over the details surrounding the breakdown of the summit. The White House contends North Korea demanded a full lifting of sanctions in exchange for shutting down a nuclear facility. The North Koreans maintain that it only asked for a partial lifting of sanctions.

Either way, most experts believe relieving the pressure on the North Korean regime would be a terrible mistake.

“You have to be prepared to walk, and this just wouldn’t have been good for our country,” Trump told Sean Hannity on Fox News.

The fact is, North Korea presents only bad options. It has nuclear weapons and is rapidly moving toward the capability of delivering them to the U.S. mainland. Developing those weapons has been a goal of the government for decades. It sees this both as a ticket to national greatness and an insurance policy for its own survival.

Administration after administration in the United States has attempted to alter North Korean behavior. All have failed.

Bill Clinton’s administration tried negotiations and aid. North Korea signed an agreement and then promptly violated it.

Subsequent presidents tried sanctions, multi-lateral talks and U.N. resolutions, all to no avail.

Trump gambled that direct leader-to-leader talks might produce a breakthrough. So far, it has not. It’s hard to see what might work. Each of the alternatives is unappealing. They include:

A military option. The U.S. could try to take out North Korea’s facilities with an airstrike. But with those facilities dispersed and, in some cases, buried underground, the chance of success would be low. And it almost surely would trigger a ferocious retaliation. It might even lead to a war that would be ruinous for both the United States and the Korean Peninsula.

Nuclear proliferation. Some have suggested providing nuclear weapons to South Korea and Japan as a counter-weight. Such a move would be highly provocative, would raise the chances of a nuclear exchange and would alarm China. And it is far from clear South Korea and Japan even would want to accept the risk.

Do nothing. The United States could simply allow North Korea to complete its long-range missile program in a high-tension environment and hope for the best.

The strategy Trump has chosen is to keep talking, give Kim the international prestige he craves and keep up the “maximum pressure” campaign of sanctions.

That is a far cry from ideal. Except when compared with two years ago, when North Korea was issuing frequent bellicose statements and conducting long-range missile tests. For that matter, Trump was returning rhetorical bombs, threatening “fire and fury.”

Some of the same people now blasting the president for giving Kim a P.R. win were freaking out over the prospect that he would stumble into a nuclear war.

The current situation is probably the best-case scenario absent a dramatic change in the North Korean regime or full cooperation from China, whose help allows North Korea to evade the full impact of international sanctions.